No Fluff Just Stuff

Jul 16, 2003

I spent the last weekend at the No Fluff Just Stuff (www.nofluffjuststuff.com)
Ohio
Java Software Symposium in Cincinnati.

Jim Weirich (onestepback.org/)
took
much better notes than I did, so I’ll leave it to him to chronicle
what we saw. We happened to go to the same sessions by chance (or was
it
something about the fact that we were both Ruby geeks at a Java
conference
and were attracted to the same topics?).

Jay Zimmerman (conference organizer) has done an excellent job by
sticking
to a few guiding principles:

No vendor sales-pitch presentations

Keeping it small and personal (encouraging speakers to interact with
attendees)

Practical technical presentations that attendees can apply to their work

Constant feedback collection from attendees and adaptation of the
content/format as a result (it really shows).

I had a great time. The sessions were fantastic, but the best thing
was
meeting a lot of smart people and participating in some interesting
side
conversations. I’ve only been to a couple of conferences, but from
what I’ve seen the main draw for me will always be the
between-the-sessions chat time.

Primary takeaways from the conference:

Java people sure do use a lot of XML. I get the feeling they’d like
to be using a scripting language, and they use XML as an attempt to
fill
this void.

Naked Objects (www.nakedobjects.org) is much
more
interesting than I thought it was. I thought it was a fascinating
novelty
when I first saw it, but seeing Dave (pragprog.com/pragdave) speak
about
it made me realize just how important it might be.

Some of the smartest Java people in the industry seem to spend a lot
of
effort working around road blocks in the Java language and
accompanying
acronyms.

I realized just how much time software developers spend on plumbing
vs.
value added business logic.

In short, if you’re a software developer or someone who works with
software developers, I would highly recommend checking out the web site
and
looking for a No Fluff Just Stuff symposium in a city near you. It’s
well worth the price of admission.